Chapter XI: Part 11

The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit, Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as Virgil’s Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: _Et se cupit ante videri._ Another of Chamfort’s cynical _maximes et pensées_ runs thus: “Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, _Si cadens adoraveris me_.” Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the right hand’s largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon’s famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV know what were his designs against the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme of action; “but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left.” And the vulgar mean the commonalty, the many, the _polloi_. The doer of good, therefore, who does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is treated in literature and life as what is called a “character.” Goldsmith makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him unobserved. “He had, however,” writes the Chinese citizen of the world, “no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.” And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know “what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett, again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving, retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did:

“Yet was thy liberality discreet,
Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat;
And though in act unwearied, _secret still_,
As in some solitude the summer rill
Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green,
And cheers the drooping flowers, _unheard_, _unseen_.”

When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees; but “he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall.” Free gifts by stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron’s; of whom, for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland’s death, the poet reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant [Byron a sponsor!—but let that pass]; and that after the “christening” he inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house. Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him “un de ces dieux bienfaiteurs de l’humanité, mais qui n’en partagent point la tendresse.” Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only the hand was opened behind his own back: _il sut être bienveillant en secret_. Amid James Watt’s donations in aid of sound and useful learning, testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted; but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better “had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the frost.” “Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth;[30] but nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind in general.” The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John Newton: “Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever, and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: “I shall probably never see him,” writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide of benefactions; but “he will always have a niche in the museum of my reverential remembrance.” Even without _that_, the Unknown had his reward.

“Charity ever
Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet
In the receiver.”

_TO-MORROW._

ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.

The rich man in the parable was self-complacently far-sighted in his foresight, when he took stock of his much goods laid up for many years; but that very night his soul was to be required of him. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry, was his easy-going style of self-communing: many are the years in store for thee, and all of these well stored with whatever makes this life worth the living. And just in the same easy-going style is pitched the prospective self-assurance of the worldlings censured by St. James. “Go to now, ye that say, to-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? it is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. To-day, while it is called to-day,—hardly this can be called thine. But to-morrow, whose is that? Even the uttermost sensualist owns it to be none of his, when he sets up for his motto, at once a reminder to live fast and a _memento mori_,—Let us eat and drink to-day, for to-morrow we die. So far he is at least verbally wiser than his brethren of the cup and the platter, whose style is, “Come ye, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Little reck they of the platitude that all flesh is grass, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven.

Macbeth’s threefold To-morrow is a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue:—

“TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”

So muses the usurper, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, _They come_—even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one of women bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of “The queen, my lord, is dead,” but elicits for response, “She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.—_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow._”...

In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating,—

... “Here will I lie to-night;
[_Soldiers begin to set up the King’s tent._
But where to-morrow?—Well, all’s one for that.”

To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur’s encounter with the king’s forces at Shrewsbury,—

“To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day
Wherein the fortune of ten thousand men
Must ’bide the touch.”

While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity, replies,—

“Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in;
I’ll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel,
Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.”

Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio:

“Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,
It would be thus with him;—he must die to-morrow.

_Isab._ To-morrow! O, that’s sudden! Spare, him, spare him;
He’s not prepared for death.”

Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man:—

“Look, here’s the warrant, Claudio, for thy death:
’Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow
Thou must be made immortal.”

Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,—

“Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,
But he must die to-morrow?

_Prov._ None, sir; none.”

One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night:

“_Lady M._ And when goes hence?

_Macb._ To-morrow,—as he purposes.

_Lady M._ O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!”

Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to _him_,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of illustration.

Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists:

“I listened to their honest chat;
Said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be
Plod, plod along the featureless sands
And coasting miles and miles of sea.’
Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide
We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’
Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet.’
‘To-morrow,’ said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way;
‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Then life stood still at blessed noon,
I, only I, had passed away:
‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried:
I was of yesterday.”

It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. “A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow: to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.

Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.

“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.”

“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”

The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.

_J’ai vécu_—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow—_nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain_—that he quotes the _vers charmants_ made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards:—

“Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi!
Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne:
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.”

“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star:

“We struggle with our fate,
While health, power, glory, from their height decline,
Depressed; and then extinguished; and our state,
In this, how different, lost Star, from thine,
That no to-morrow shall our beams restore!”

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when, on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s

Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora Di superi?

(who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able to promise himself a morrow:

Nemo tam divos habuit faventes,
Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.

When Archias, the polemarch at Thebes, dissolved in wine and pleasure, received from his pontifical namesake at Athens a full and particular account by letter of the conspiracy of Pelopidas and the exiles, who were even then counting the minutes ere they struck the blow,—although the messenger expressly urged his excellency to read the missive forthwith, as the contents were of instant import, Archias only smiled a tipsy smile, and said, “Business to-morrow.” Then he put the unopened letter under the bolster of his couch, and resumed his colloquy with his host, Philidias, who was in the plot, and who was taking good care to ply the polemarch with wine. Business to-morrow. To-morrow as he purposed! Oh, never should sun that morrow see.

_Si hodie non es paratus, quo modo cras eris? CRAS est dies incertus: et qui scis si crastinum habebis_? To-morrow, in this its prospective, procrastinating sense, is denounced by Mr. Sala, with all due asperity, as a wretched, cowardly, idiotic subterfuge and apology—a “suicidal delusion and pitfall.” Yes, to-morrow I will begin to learn Syro-Chaldaic (we overhear him saying): I will read the novel of the day to-day. To-morrow I will dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water. To-day I will ask the _chef_ at the club to send me up a pretty little dinner, not forgetting that irresistible _choufleur au gratin_, and bid the butler bring me that curious pommard with the iron-grey seal. To-morrow I will finish my _magnum opus_, my “Treatise on the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes in their relation to Human Wisdom and Knowledge.” To-day flippant rubbish or frothy egotism shall flow from my pen. To-morrow I will pay my tailor. To-day I will order a new coat. In fine: “To-morrow I will atone for the wrong, and pray for strength to continue in the right. To-day I will follow my devices, and listen to the promptings of the world, the flesh, and the devil. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”

For many years, the late Alfred de Vigny continued slowly amassing poetical materials, though publishing nothing, and murmuring always, like André Chenier,—

“Rien n’est fait aujourd’hui, tout sera fait _demain_.”

The morrow has come, wrote the _Journal des Débats_, in recording his death, and his artist hands are cold in the grave.

Says the Cordelier to the condemned Thief in Mat Prior’s derry-down ballad,—

“Courage, friend; to-day is your period of sorrow;
And things will go better, believe me, to-morrow.”

But what says the Thief in reply?

“To-morrow? our hero replied in a fright:
He that’s hanged before noon, ought to think of to-night.”

But Prior will supply us with more than one study of the subject. Here is a variation, for instance, in matter, manner, and metre:—

“The hoary fool, who many days
Has struggled with continued sorrow,
Renews his hope, and blindly lays
The desperate bet upon to-morrow.

“To-morrow comes; ’tis noon, ’tis night;
This day like all the former flies:
Yet on he runs, to seek delight
To-morrow, till to-night he dies.”

The gaming allusion of the first stanza reminds us of the picture of a certain devotee at the _roulette_ table at Hombourg, who kept his seat—tranquil, immovable, vigilant,—the Napoleon of _roulette_; in whose victorious progress Marengos and Austerlitzes succeeded each other, as if Moscow and the Beresina were phantoms—as if to-morrow would never come. To-morrow; ay, that dread to-morrow that comes to all: the fateful _Demain_ of Victor:

“Demain est la sapin du trône,
Aujourd’hui c’en est le velours.”

Yes, to-morrow is the coarse deal, with its ten sacks, that forms the framework of the throne, as to-day is its velvet and gilding.

“Demain c’est le coursier qui s’abat plein d’écume;
Demain, O conquérant, c’est Moscou qui s’allume
La nuit comme un flambeau:
C’est not’ vieille garde qui jonche au lointain la plaine,
Demain c’est Waterloo! Demain c’est Ste. Helène!
Demain c’est le tombeau!”

And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret: “To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative, that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could foretell the events of to-morrow?

So thought Sunderland, in that “agony of terror,” almost over-wrought or over-coloured, perhaps, by Macaulay, which impelled him to resign office, in a sort of frenzied haste. He had asked some of his friends to come to his house that he might consult them; they came at the appointed time, but found that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he should soon be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not the gold key which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where it was. “At Kensington,” answered Sunderland. They found that he had tendered his resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle, accepted. They blamed his haste, and told him that since he had summoned them to advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the morrow. “To-morrow,” he exclaimed “would have ruined me. To-night has saved me.”

A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant):

... “Credula vitam
Spes fovet, ac melius cras fore semper ait.”

They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought, when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though _he_ makes to-morrow come fast enough, one _per diem_,—and go quite as fast as it came:

... “Cum lux altera venit,
Jam cras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud cras
Egerit hys annos.”

Matter-of-fact people will tell you that To-morrow does come, and fix by their stop-watch the instant of its arrival. Nay, they can appeal to the _primus inter poetas_ for poetical verification of their view. Says the Messenger to the Provost, while it is yet dark, on the morning which is appointed to be Claudio’s last, “Good morrow; for, as I take it, it is almost day.” And so with the peers who enter sleepless King Henry’s chamber, at the hour they name:

“_Warwick._ Many good morrows to your majesty.

_K. Hen._ Is it good morrow, lords?

_War._ ’Tis one o’clock, and past.

_K. Hen._ Why then, good morrow to you all, my lords.”

But, in its own sense, the saying holds good, and is good sense too, that To-morrow never comes. One might take for emblem of its import the touching story told by Southey, of a lady on the point of marriage, whose affianced husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, and who, going one day to meet him, found instead of her betrothed an old friend, despatched to announce to her his sudden death. She uttered a scream, and piteously exclaimed, “He is dead!” But then all consciousness of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. From that fatal moment she had daily, for fifty years, at the time Dr. Uwins wrote, and “in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles, where she expected her future husband to alight from the coach; and every day [adds the doctor, writing in the then present tense] she utters in a plaintive tone, “He is not come yet! I will return to-morrow.” _To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow_—that to her never was, but always was to be.

Why, and how, To-morrow never comes, might be discussed in a strain of transcendental metaphysics. Mr. Carlyle, in a memorable chapter headed Natural Supernaturalism, expounds in his mystic suggestive way the philosophic thesis, that Time and Space are but creations of God,—with whom as it is a universal HERE, so it is an everlasting Now. And as regards Man: is the Past annihilated, or only past? is the Future non-extant, or only future? “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, and the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both _are_. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal.”

It is but a glance the strongest eye can take, in that direction. But even a glance may secure a glimpse of things which filmy, unpurged, downlooking eye hath not seen, nor ear heard—for they seem to involve unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To-morrow thou hast never seen; to thee it has never come. But it shall come. And it that shall come, will come; and will not tarry. Wait the great teacher, Death. _CRAS iterabimus æquor_: to-morrow we shall be sounding our dim and perilous way across the dark waters of that fathomless sea. If the prospect appals, happy he that can adapt to his own hopes, in serenest confidence, yet eager anticipation,—as he speculates on what a day, and the Better Land, may bring forth: To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new.

_THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER._

1 CORINTHIANS xiv. 33, 40.

Practically, the amount of confusion prevalent in the church of Corinth, arising from irregularities incident to the exercise of “tongues,” and to the undisciplined energies of a mixed congregation, appears to have almost rivalled the disorder in the theatre of Ephesus, when the whole city was filled with confusion, and some cried one thing, and some another; for the assembly was confused, and the most part knew not wherefore they were come together. So, when the whole church of Corinth were come together into one place, and all spoke with tongues, to outsiders that for the nonce stepped inside they must appear mad. All things were done indecorously and in most admired disorder. Now, St. Paul was for having all things done decently and in order. “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” Order is Heaven’s first law. The same apostle is prompt to remind the Thessalonians that he behaved himself not disorderly among them; and this he did because he heard that there were some among them which walked disorderly—ἀτάκτως. The apostolic canon for both Corinth and Thessalonica, and all other churches, is, Πὰντα δὲ κατὰ τάξιν γινέσθω. Let them all walk by this same rule, and all mind this same thing.

* * * * *

As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony, unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man, they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s ordaining, or ordering,—

“How mean the order and perfection sought
In the best product of the human thought,
Compared to the great harmony that reigns
In what the Spirit of the world ordains!”

Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote, infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what _is_ order.” Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:—

“Distance deceives the sight. Ye move and sway
With life; yet are your hoverings on the brink
Of ruin but the freedom and the play
That binds your dance of beauty, link to link,
In woven joy that shall not fail nor shrink.
... Thrones arise and sink,
Earth is transformed beneath you: ye remain,
Clasping distracted man with Order’s sacred chain.”

So Wordsworth, addressing as it were a deified idea of Duty, pays this homage:—

... “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.”

Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same star-gazer speaking:—

“Do I not climb in you, O blessèd host,
The way of symbols, shining steps to God?
When most man knows you, he is certain most
One law unswerving reigns from star to clod.”

“Of law,” says Hooker, at the close of his first book of Ecclesiastical Polity, with an eloquence which has ever been most admired by the most admirable masters of English prose,—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” Considering when he wrote, what he wrote, and to what purpose and in what spirit he wrote, there seems to us a beautiful consistency in Richard Hooker’s deathbed meditations, as related in the familiar memoir by Izaak Walton. Found by his trustiest visitor, “deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse,” and asked what was the subject of his present thoughts, he replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!”

There is not, affirms a modern divine, a corner of the world, nor a process of nature, nor a piece of God’s handiwork of any kind whatever, on which His love of order is not written with a plainness not to be mistaken. “System and method, law and order, symmetry and punctuality, are conspicuous everywhere; indicating at once the value attached to these things in the mind of God, and his dislike for their opposites—confusion, fitfulness, irregularity.” Nor is the Divine love of order a quality that ever leads to stiffness, formality, or monotony; for it is shown to be constantly associated with beauty, variety, and freedom.

M. Jules Simon interpolates into his argument for the vast preponderance of good over evil in the world, a casually expressed identification of good with order: “le bien, c’est-à-dire, l’ordre, car dans le monde le bien et l’ordre ne font qu’un.”

“Some think Disorder means God’s moral plan;
But Evil oscillates in certain bounds.
Ten thousand causes check the rage of man:
His utmost crimes a wall of brass surrounds;
Mere weariness exhausts War’s yelling hounds;
And, if all fail, Death comes with his great wave,
That levels all the hollows and the mounds
Of human life. Who then shall be so brave
As of Confusion found in God’s large thoughts to rave?”

Readers familiar with the writings first and last of Mr. Carlyle, will readily call to mind many a terse utterance in vindication of the Divine authorship and Divine authority of order. _Dis_order he pronounces to be a thing which “veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm,” rejects and disowns. “_Dis_order, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of things to man, who lives by sanity and by order.” “All Anarchy, all evil, all injustice, is, by the nature of it, ... suicidal, and cannot endure.” “Arrangement is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old primary evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer!” Such sentences admit of almost infinite multiplication. “Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon die.” Hence this philosopher’s partiality for “heroes,” even of the least estimable type, provided they have will and force to replace confusion by order. Cortès is not among the specified Heroes of his special Hero-worship; but he deserves a place by reason of the preamble to that code of ordinances, as the conqueror of Mexico himself terms them, which he set forth in restraint of his army: the essential purport of this preamble being, that in all institutions, whether Divine or human (if the latter have any worth), order is the great law.

It was in support of the cause of social order that Luther took to exposing the dangers due to ignorant innovators, and strenuously declared that “God Himself constituted certain authorities to direct the world; for it is a great feature in His magnificent system, that there shall be order here below.” Doctor Martin may, in this respect, be called a man after our Hero-worshipper’s own heart; such another as the one of whom he wrote,—“Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care; here is the man that has declared war with it, that will never make peace with it. Man is the Missionary of Order; he is the servant, not of the Devil and of Chaos, but of God and the universe.” And Christian doctrine teaches that the order and beauty of the outward world are symbols of that inward order and symmetry, that peace and purity of heart, that universal harmony between God’s will and man’s will, which it is one great object of Christianity to establish.

“Then quick I ran my glance about the globe,
To find Religion link’d with Order’s aim,
Ruling by love and light,”

says the Christian poet, who has, however, to deplore the disappointments of his quest. Of all orderly things that are beautiful in God’s eyes, it has been said, there can be none so beautiful as an orderly or holy soul. “Once in this world the sight presented itself in spotless beauty and brilliancy.” Everything there seen was in its place: reason, conscience, will, feeling, instinct, appetite, “all most beautifully arranged; each was in perfect health, and all were in thorough harmony with the will of God.” But that was God manifest in the flesh. Order incarnate. Without Him, in the material world, was not anything made that was made. Apart from Him, the moral world is without form and void, and darkness covers the face of its deep. Order, in fine, is the indispensable postulate of every given cosmos. In the words of Schiller—

“It is the keystone of the world’s wide arch;
The one sustaining and sustained by all,
Which, if it fall, brings all in ruin down.”

Of the Church as a family, George Herbert, ever quaint in his devotion, sings or says—after a depreciation of his own unruly thoughts:

“But, Lord, the house and family are Thine,
Though some of them repine.
Turn out these wranglers, which defile Thy seat:
For where Thou dwellest all is neat.

“First Peace and Silence all disputes control,
Then _Order_ plays the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and hours,
Makes of wild woods sweet walks and bowers.”

So Dryden traces to harmony this universal frame—a cosmos evolved from chaos, from a heap of jarring atoms that, at the Divine summons,—

“_In order_ to their stations leap.”

Shaftesbury contends that the admiration and love of order, in whatever kind, is “naturally improving to the temper, advantageous to social affection, and highly assistant to virtue—which is itself no other than the love of order and beauty in society.” In the meanest subjects of the world, he goes on to say, the appearance of order gains upon the mind, and draws the affections towards it. “For ’tis impossible that such a Divine order should be contemplated without ecstasy and rapture; since in the common subjects of science, and the liberal arts, whatever is according to just harmony and proportion is so transporting to those who have any knowledge or practice in the kind.” In another place he elaborates the thesis, that whatever things have order, have unity of design, and concur in one, and are parts constituent of one whole—just as a symphony is a certain system of proportioned sounds. It is noteworthy that Pythagoras deduced his celebrated theory of the music of the spheres from his assumption that everything in the great arrangement (κόσμος) which he called the world must be harmoniously arranged (and that, accordingly, the planets were at the same relative distance as the divisions of the monochord, etc.) Divine as the philosophy of Plato is commonly esteemed, there are, on the other hand, occasional glimpses in it of what one of his commentators calls the “appalling doctrine” that God alternately governs and forsakes the world—the world when he forsakes it, suddenly changing its orbit, so that all things are in disorder, and mundane existence is totally disarranged: “only after some time do things settle down to a sort of order, though of a very imperfect kind.” Spinoza takes order to be a thing of the imagination, as also he does right and wrong, useful and hurtful—these being merely such, he argues, in relation to us. But this would not prevent him, from his stand-point, assenting to the ethical import of order—as expounded for instance by the Shakspearian Ulysses:

“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place, ...
Office, and custom, in all line of order....
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.”

Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the Dorian lawgivers, that order (κόσμος) is the basis of civil government. As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of _harmonie politique_ when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that “the peoples” have a keen need of order. The racy author of the “Biglow Papers” discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on the indispensableness (not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law:—

“Onsettle _that_, an’ all the world goes whiz,
A screw is loose in everything there is.”

Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogue—urges that he was precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. “Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that.” Every such man, on Mr. Carlyle’s showing, is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in it; but what then? “Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together.” And it is in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder—a seeming anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. “His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order.” Is not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of Order?

The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor, bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: “Gravez au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut _l’ordre_ avant tout.” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a formless grey confusion covered all:—

“As when of old (so sung the Hebrew bard)
Light, uncollected, through the chaos urged
Its infant way; nor Order yet had drawn
His lovely train from out the dubious gloom.”

That a scrupulous regard for order, in some sort, is nevertheless compatible with a very low standard of moral worth, is recognised and illustrated by poet Crabbe—prose-poet the good parson was, not quite in the accepted sense—in a series of pithy, if not pungent rhymes:—

“The love of order—I the thing receive
From reverend men, and I in part believe—
Shows a clear mind and clean, and whoso needs
This love, but seldom in the world succeeds;
And yet with this some other love must be,
Ere I can fully to the fact agree;
Valour and study may by order gain,
By order sovereigns hold more steady reign;
Through all the tribes of nature order runs,
And rules around in systems and in suns:
Still has the love of order found a place
With all that’s low, degrading, mean, and base,
With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace:
In the cold miser, of all change afraid,
In pompous men in public seats obeyed;
In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones;
...
Order to these is armour and defence,
And love of method serves in lack of sense.”

Exceptions allowed for, as in every rule, yet is the rule sufficiently approved, that order is heaven’s first law. The poet of “The Angel in the House” in style, and spirit, and sentiment, how salient a contrast to Crabbe, utters the conceit (_poeticè_) in one of his tender preludes, that—

“Sweet Order has its draught of bliss
Graced with the pearl of God’s consent,”—

a conceit that allows of wide application, as do many of those of so suggestive a writer.

But to conclude. When the judicious Hooker—to call him by his conventional epithet—lay a-dying, he expressed his joy at the near prospect of entering a World of Order. The author of “The Book of the Church” emphasises the import of holy Richard’s “placid and profound contentment,” by reminding us that because he had been employed in ecclesiastical polemics, and because his life had been passed under the perpetual discomfort of domestic discord, the happiness of heaven must have seemed in Hooker’s estimation, to consist primarily in Order, as, indeed, in all human societies this is the first thing needful.

_SWEET SLEEP, AND ITS FORFEITURE._

PROVERBS iii. 24.

To him that keepeth sound wisdom and instruction is the promise given, not only that he shall walk in his way safely, and his foot shall not stumble,—this for daytime and its activities,—but further, as regards night-time and its contingencies, that when he lies down he shall not be afraid; yea, he shall lie down, and his sleep shall be sweet. So He giveth His beloved sleep, of whom the Psalmist said, “I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.” Surely, in order that one may pray with full purpose of heart the prayer, Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his! one should live the life that may warrant the nightly petition, Let me sleep the sleep of the just, and let mine eyes close quietly in slumber even as his.

Macbeth, within this minute a murderer, _ipso facto_ realizes the appalling truth, that between him and placid sleep there is, from henceforth and for evermore, a great gulf fixed, as impassable as abysmal.

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,⸺’

_Lady M._ What do you mean?

_Macb._ Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep; and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!’”

How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician and waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. “To bed, to bed, to bed.” But what avails _that_ to the somnambulist, ever in semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr. G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was: “He goes to bed at eight o’clock, and while we are reading or writing or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy—an unbroken slumber, apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans. This man-killer, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner.” Perhaps that is not saying much,—considering what a turtle dinner comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it is to be hoped, a great deal too much: “So false are traditions; so false are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies.” One would be sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction the poets tell us of cases in which _non avium citharæque cantus_, or any other aids and appliances, _somnum reducent_. “Wherefore to me,” asks Clytemnestra,—

... “is solacing sleep denied?
And honourable rest, the right of all?
So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell,
Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody,
Nor silence under dreamful canopies,
Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch,
May lull this fever for a little while.”

Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in one of Landor’s fragments,—

“It wakes me many mornings, many nights,
And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”

Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel Whyte Melville’s remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are dead and gone: “What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is Mr. Trollope’s Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest—to be able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was first committed. “She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position came upon her.” As with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,—

“Many a time for hours
In the dead night, grim faces came and went
Before her, or a vague spiritual fear—
Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors,
Heard by the watcher in a haunted house,
That keeps the rust of murder on the walls—
Held her awake. Or if she slept, she dream’d
An awful dream ...
... and with a cry she woke.
And all this trouble did not pass, but grew.”

There is Donatello, in Hawthorne’s “Transformation,” succumbing to a stupor, which he mistakes for such drowsiness as he has known in his innocent past life. There is Albert Maurice, in “Mary of Burgundy,” gazing on the Vert Gallant of Hannut as he lay in a deep, sweet sleep—so calm and tranquil, though within the walls of a prison, suffering from injuries, and exposed to constant danger; gazing with a sense of envy and regret, “which few, perhaps, can appreciate fully, who have not felt the sharp tooth of remorse begin its sleepless gnawings on the heart. He would not have disturbed such slumbers for the world; and, withdrawing again with a noiseless step, he retired to his own chamber, and cast himself down upon his bed, to snatch, at least, that heated and disturbed sleep, which was all the repose that he was ever more to know on earth.” To such as him can nothing bring back, in the hour and power of darkness, more than an embittered memory of times

“When that placid sleep came o’er him
Which he ne’er can know again.”

An innocent comforter in a modern tragedy offers a disquieted spirit the assurance, as regards the object of his disquiet, that “’twill away in sleep.” But his answer is,—

“No, no! I dare not sleep—for well I know
That then the knife will gleam, the blood will gush,
The form will stiffen!”

From the night of the massacre of Glencoe, Glenlyon, as Macaulay tells us, was never again the man that he had been before that night. The form of his countenance was changed; and “in all places, at all hours, whether he waked or slept, Glencoe was for ever before him.” As with a distinguished foreigner of a later generation, _Depuis ce moment, point de sommeil, point de repos; il croyait toujours voir un glaive arrêté sur sa tête_. In such cases, the sleepers start from broken slumbers, as if starting back from the edge of a precipice; for,—

“Their whole tranquillity of heart is gone;
The peace wherewith till now they have been blest
Hath taken its departure. In the breast
Fast following thoughts and busy fancies throng;
Their sleep itself is feverish, and possest
With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.”

“Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness? Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone. The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,—

“Never sleep more, never more taste of peace,
Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark,
And ever at their elbow horror walks,
Shaking them like a palsy.”

The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:—